When the Flood Falls

by J. E. Barnard

  Hoping Dee was doing as she was told, Lacey opened the door. The river’s roar ran like ice water down her spine. A scant second later, the dogs’ howls split the silence, letting her know just what they thought of an interloper daring to open a door of their mistress’s house. Which made it an even bigger mystery: if someone really had been prowling in the yard, why had the dogs remained silent?

  Behind her, Dee’s voice calmed the dogs.

  Lacey spun. “What are you doing down here? I told you to wait upstairs.”

  “I decided I couldn’t hide out and let you defend my turf for me.” Dee sounded half defiant and half scared out of her mind. “Did you see who it was?”

  “I didn’t see anybody. Or any movement at all until I opened the door and the dogs freaked out.” Lacey peered hard at Dee, but the dark within the room hid her friend’s expression. “Are you 100 percent sure you heard somebody on the deck? Because the dogs are obviously fine, and they’re very much defending the place right now.”

  “Oh god,” said Dee. “Not again. Please, Lacey, can you just walk around the house? Make sure nobody’s tampered with the windows or anything? I’ll tell you everything when you come back in.”

  “All right, but I want the outside lights on. I’ve tripped over enough stuff already.”

  Lacey stood silent on the deck, eying the ring of ominous darkness beyond the terrace lights. The dogs, vigilant in their pen, watched not the dark treeline, but the interloper on their deck. Likely they sensed her tension but, obedient to Dee’s shout, they didn’t make a sound. She was thankful for that much. Five minutes outside, examining each door handle and window latch by the strong beam of a flashlight, showed that nothing had changed since her afternoon’s perimeter check. No scrapes or scratches, no smudges save those she had left herself when trying to peer in earlier. She made a thorough job of it again, circling the garage and the dog pen, conscious with every step of the dogs pacing her inside their wire fence. The river’s menace washed louder over her nerves. She shivered and didn’t try to tell herself it was just the midnight chill on her bare arms.

  As she came in the mudroom door, she called out, “Just me.”

  Dee was making tea, her silhouette edged by the light from the stove hood. She poured the boiling water with intense concentration. “You didn’t see anyone.”

  “No sign of anybody.” Lacey locked the door and drew the blind, but left the outside lights on. “You ever think of getting motion-sensor lights? They’d be a deterrent.”

  “They’re on the garage, pointing down the drive.”

  Impossible to read her emotions from that clipped sentence. Lacey prodded for another response. “More of them would be good. On the deck or over the backyard?”

  “Animals would set them off all night. And I can’t afford them, anyway.” Dee’s voice was strung tighter than an off-key violin. Her hand shook as she pulled mugs from the cupboard. “You want canned milk with your tea? I bought some special, just like the old days. It’s in the fridge.”

  “Heavenly,” said Lacey, as she reached for the glossy black refrigerator handle. She kept her eye on Dee, though, and saw well enough when her friend blotted her eyes on a cloth napkin. Dee, crying? It was almost unthinkable, like the Hoover Dam springing a leak. “Hey, now, take it easy. We’ll figure this out. Sit down, get your foot up, and tell the big mean ex-cop all your troubles. For real this time.”

  It took a good few minutes before Dee looked up from crumpling the napkin between her fingers. “It might all be my imagination, although heaven knows I listen hard enough. And tonight I was sure I heard boot heels on the deck. Not just once, but from my room and again from yours. Maybe I’ve been staying awake too much, stressing, and my mind is playing tricks on me. God knows I need a decent night’s sleep. I don’t think I’ve had one in months.”

  “What is it that keeps you awake? Pain in your ankle, job stuff, fear of a prowler?”

  “It’s not just a fear,” Dee snapped. “Somebody is prowling around my house at night. Somebody the dogs don’t bark at.”

  Lacey’s domestic violence meter clicked up another notch. The blinds had indeed been an early clue. “Neil? The dogs wouldn’t bark at him, would they? Did he ever hit you, Dee? Or threaten you?”

  “Never. He might have thought about it a few times, but he’d have worried about breaking a nail.” Dee pressed the napkin to her eyes again. Her voice came out muffled under the drooping cloth. “He left me in the most humiliating way possible, and he has nothing to gain by sneaking back here at night. In fact, since I pay him spousal support, he might even lose by being so stupid.”

  Potential gain wasn’t the reason most men stalked their exes. It was blind, irrational rage that motivated such behaviour. Lacey had seen that all too often on the job. Women who were stalked, terrified, beaten. Killed for the crime of leaving. For an instant Dan’s face flashed up, those nights when she’d shoved a dresser across her bedroom door in case he tried to get into the house while she was asleep, before she had the locks changed. Why did Dee blithely assume Neil was any safer? Lacey took a breath and a sip of milky tea, refocusing. Go back to the evidence. See what was there.

  “Okay, you’re sure someone has been here some nights. You’ve heard footsteps when there shouldn’t be any. Has there been any concrete evidence afterward?”

  “The first time I heard them, a few months ago, there were boot prints in the snow the next morning. Down from the path in back, past the dog run to the porch, and out the same way. I hadn’t looked the day before, so I don’t know if it was a neighbour walking by that way to see if I was home, or if it happened that night.” Dee lowered the napkin. “But I heard someone.”

  “I’ll accept your word on that. And the next time?”

  “Another time there was dried mud on the deck when I woke up one morning. I hadn’t come in that way, so it might have been done the day before.” Dee’s eyes, red-rimmed and etched around with fine lines, flickered over each of the tightly curtained windows. “Not conclusive, I know. But another time I very distinctly heard footsteps right on the porch. I wasn’t even asleep yet, just lying in bed in the dark, watching the moon over the snowcaps down south. I lay there wondering if I’d heard what I thought I heard. Then they started up again. I ran to the window first, didn’t see anyone, so I ran downstairs. Whoever it was had gone by the time I got the lights on. Or they were hiding in the trees, watching me.” Dee shuddered. “I went out for a good look around at first light, but I couldn’t see anything unusual. No mud, no snow to leave footprints in.

  “Now I stay awake night after night listening for them to come back. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone from window to window, like you did tonight, looking out, always afraid I’d see someone looking back. I telecommute as much as possible rather than come home to an empty house. Especially after dark.” Her voice rose. “I’ve been getting away with it because the museum opening is so close, and it’s my job to make sure our corporate sponsorship is well managed. But that excuse is going to run out in another week, and then my real job will be on the line. If I lose my salary over this, I’ll lose the house, too. Everything.” She clutched Lacey’s hand. “I need to know, 100 percent, if it’s in my mind or if there really is, or has been, a prowler. Please say you’ll stay with me. At least until the Centre’s big opening gala.”

  “I’ll stay,” said Lacey without hesitation, “until we’ve sorted this out one way or another. Now, drink your tea. If there was someone out there tonight, they will have realized that you’re not alone, and they won’t come back. In the morning I’ll have a good look around, and we’ll talk over everything, identify anybody who might think they have a reason to creep around here at night. The lights can stay on for tonight, and tomorrow I’ll see if Wayne has any spare motion sensors he can loan me.”

  “You won’t tell him why? I can’t have people at the museum site tal
king about me. I can’t look weak right before the opening.”

  “I’ll tell him there’s a bear or something bugging the dogs at night. Okay?” Lacey lifted her mug and paused. “You do have bears out here, right?”

  “Bears, cougars, other predators.”

  Including humans, Lacey thought, but she didn’t say that. Neither did she say just how disturbed she was by Dee’s near-hysterical fear of a possible prowler. Either Neil had left her more afraid of him than she was willing to admit, or she was utterly overwhelmed by her job, her divorce, her injury, and now the crush of the museum’s grand opening. The stress of any two of those might bring on some paranoid imaginings to a woman living alone in the forest. Dee was never one to be crushed that easily, but she’d carried this terror alone since there was snow on the ground. If she cracked now, it wouldn’t be surprising at all. That wouldn’t happen, though. Lacey would be here to keep her fear at bay until the museum was successfully opened for tourists.

  As she followed Dee up the stairs a few minutes later, having very visibly rechecked every door and window, she thought that Dee might never sleep again if she ever shared the third possibility that sprang to mind: that someone might be prowling out there, careful not to leave evidence, not trying to enter or to do obvious harm, but deliberately playing on the frayed nerves of an isolated woman recovering from an injury. But gaslighting someone needed a motive. Who stood to gain if Dee fled back to the city and sold her log McMansion at a loss?

  The following morning, Dee surprised her again, this time by saying, as Lacey followed the smell of coffee to the kitchen, “You know, I never realized how crazy I would sound until I heard myself trying to explain it to you. I’ve been alone with this for so long I’ve lost all perspective. Thanks for not telling me I was nuts last night, but I kind of am. So I’ve got an action plan.”

  That was more like the old Dee: action plans at an hour when other people were barely able to open both eyes at the same time. Lacey accepted the offered mug. “And your plan is?”

  “First, I’m going to refill my prescription for anti-anxiety meds. I was taking them for a bit after the accident but they ran out months ago. Second, you’re going to — if you will, that is — help me get my bike down from the garage rafters. I always used to go running or biking to burn off the stress, but I’ve gotten away from the habit. My physiotherapist even suggested I try biking again, but I was busy and just put it off. Now I know I need that stress busting, and after yesterday I realize running is still a long way off. So biking it is.”

  “Those ideas both sound sensible. Er, do you still want me to stay for a few days?”

  “God yes! You’re the first breath of sane air in this house for months. Do you have a mountain bike? If not, I can borrow one for you.”

  “Mine’s at Tom’s. I can bring it out tonight when I fetch more clothes.”

  “Great.” Dee slapped the top on a travel mug. “I’m off to the office. But I’ll be back by eleven for a press conference at the museum. See you then.” She headed for the back door, then paused to un-clip a secondary ring from her car keys. “You’d better have a door key. I’ll get my spare back from the neighbour if I get home before you. House is the maple leaf one and the square, plain one is for the garage. Mi casa, su casa. Just like old times.” She flashed a smile so confident, so at odds with last night’s fright, that Lacey couldn’t quite stifle the idea that Dee had been a bit too deep into the prescription pills already.

  Chapter Three

  They were working inside the loading bay, stringing camera cable up above the ceiling tiles, when Lacey got around to asking her boss about loaner lights.

  “And who is your roommate that I’d trust them with my equipment?” Wayne’s voice was dry in the way that every sergeant’s voice Lacey had ever heard was dry, like he couldn’t quite believe a rookie was asking such a stupid question, but then, what better could be expected of a rookie? She flushed without meaning to and found she was standing at parade rest without having consciously shifted position. Working for another ex-RCMP officer was supposed to ease her transition back to civilian life, but it reminded her every day that she hadn’t been strong enough, in the end, to cope with the strains of a cop’s life. Quitting on Wayne wasn’t an option; she needed something besides RCMP on her resume. And now she needed to stay near Dee, too.

  “Dee Phillips,” she said.

  His flat stare assessed her. “Well, aren’t you the savvy operator? Moved in with the boss of the whole job, just like that.”

  “We were university roommates. She heard I was out here and offered me a bed until the Centre’s wired. Saves me the commute from Calgary.” She eased out of the formal stance and repeated the request. “May I borrow two motion-sensor lights to monitor her yard for a few nights, please?”

  “No.”

  So much for that option. Maybe there were cheap versions at Canadian Tire. She could rush in right after work to buy some and whatever tools she would need to install them. Getting back to do it before dark would be tricky, especially if she went to Tom’s to pick up her stuff.

  “No,” said Wayne again. “Since she’s the president of this whole job, we should do better by her. Get me photos of the area you want covered and I’ll draw you up a plan. There are five or so spare lights in the van you can take. Is her house close enough that you can get there on your lunch break?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded, his mind already moving to the next task. “Get me the small crimpers from the van, and a half-dozen AV ends.”

  Lacey headed up the stairs to the staff exit and pushed open the flat steel door. A camera flashed in her face. She froze for a nanosecond, but the photographer was merely testing his equipment. Of course — the press conference Dee had mentioned. Out on the freshly laid lawn, a half-dozen microphones and cameras ignored the usual nutty protester by the road and focused on a grizzled cowboy in a battered beige hat and boots. He looked a hundred years old. The slender blonde leaning on his shoulder was barely a third his age. Her perfect teeth were aimed at the cameras while the fitful breeze flung strands of her glossy hair across the cowboy’s weathered face. His hand rested on a sturdy wooden sign that gave, in authentically rustic burnt lettering, the facility’s twin titles of Arts Centre and History Museum.

  The woman looked faintly familiar and the cowboy not at all, but then Lacey had been on this job for barely a week. The only person she could name in the throng was Rob, the curator/manager of the new facility. With his pleated khakis and frosted dark hair, he stood out among the worn jeans and hard hats that infested the building. She veered behind a log pillar to avoid the media and came face-to-heels with a pair of scuffed workboots on a ladder. A workman on a ladder and a second up another ladder were stretched to full height, hooking a rolled-up banner between two of the fat logs that made up the building’s colonnade. Similar banners hung between other sets of pillars, with a pull rope strung between them all.

  A videographer with a shoulder camera was the only person paying any attention to the workers, panning up their ladders, gathering background footage. Lacey edged past him, glad to be incognito in grubby civvies. No reporters today would demand comments on the Capilano River bridge incident or ask if she was part of the class action lawsuit against the RCMP. That life was behind her.

  She followed the colonnade toward the parking lot. As she stepped clear of the building, the river assaulted her ears with its menacing rumble. Surely that brown, churning mass of water was a foot higher than yesterday? It was nothing like the happy, shallow blue stream she had seen last week. She turned her back on the swollen river with a shudder and breathed deep of the fresh mountain air. It smelt faintly of fir trees and strongly of good, clean mud, much better than the usual building-site odours of varnish and diesel. She unlocked the van, leaned into the rear door, and was groping for the right crimpers when a convertible shot into the parking lot wit
h a squeal of tires. On instinct she noted the particulars: late-model BMW M6, bright orange, Alberta vanity plate Y-MAN4.

  The Bimmer skidded to a stop in a swirl of dust. Three buff young men leaped out, hurdled over the row of newly planted shrubs, and stampeded over the sod toward the entrance. Beefcakes on the hoof. The media pack swung around to meet them. By the time the next camera flashed, the blonde was in their midst, draping her hands decoratively over a muscular forearm and leaning back to let her blond locks flutter over another man’s brawny shoulders. The old cowboy, abandoned, wandered toward a nearby bench. A shabby woman there shuffled sideways, making room for him while she fumbled a cellphone toward her shaggy brown curls. Lacey’s eyes slid back to the photo op, where Blondie was basking in the camera-flashes like a starlet on a red carpet. How was this promoting the new facility?

  A shriek shredded the queit morning, so loud it echoed from the hill across the road. As Lacey spun to find its source, the shaggy woman lurched to her feet and stumbled toward the press, screeching. The cowboy jumped up, one hand reaching fruitlessly as Shaggy hurled her phone over the heads of the reporters. It bounced off an athlete’s shoulder. Media heads and camera lenses whipped toward the disturbance. Lacey’s feet were already moving, impelled by the old cop habit of running toward trouble, but Shaggy reached the scrum first. She batted a microphone away and was shoving a reporter aside when Rob leapt into her path. She staggered to a halt and slumped, weeping, onto his shoulder.

  The media pack surged forward, blocking Lacey’s path, giving her the pause she needed to recall she was a mere civilian now, with no official standing to intervene. In any event, the threat seemed to be over. She retreated.